


tastes like the real thing

by elegantstupidity



Category: Persuasion - Jane Austen
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bittersweet, Developing Relationship, F/M, Pining, Stress Baking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21668629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elegantstupidity/pseuds/elegantstupidity
Summary: Even as Anne watched a stream of thick, gleaming, melted white chocolate pour onto her sister’s cool, and formerly spotless, marble countertops, she was pretty sure that it was a bad idea.
Relationships: Anne Elliot/Frederick Wentworth
Comments: 20
Kudos: 210
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	tastes like the real thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ppyajunebug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ppyajunebug/gifts).



Even as Anne watched a stream of thick, gleaming, melted white chocolate pour onto her sister’s cool, and formerly spotless, marble countertops, she was pretty sure that it was a bad idea. 

Not because she worried that Mary would fret over the mess—that was a foregone conclusion—or because she didn’t know exactly how to temper chocolate—the Culinary Institute of America didn’t just hand out degrees, even to daughters of _the_ Walter Elliot—but because she knew her mind wasn’t fully on the task at hand. 

Ordinarily, that wasn’t a problem. She’d spent the past eight years losing herself in the kitchen, turning out pastries and pies, cakes and confections. She could do it all in her sleep. (Sometimes, Anne even did, dreaming up new, exciting flavors and designs, only to get up and go to work at the Lodge’s bakery making the same things that had been on the menu since before she was born.)

But today, she wasn’t faced with her average distractions, and usually, she wasn’t working with chocolate. 

Chocolate was temperamental. Finicky and sensitive. (Not unlike Mary, though Anne had never mastered the art of coaxing chocolate into sweet, brilliant order as she had her sister.) Ready to seize up at her slightest slip or lose heat too quickly, leaving her with a dull, brittle product and forcing her to start the process all over again. 

Honestly, though, having to start over and extend her time focusing on the task at hand didn’t sound like the worst thing at the moment.

Anne shook the thought off, picking up her bench scraper and offset spatula and keeping her eyes on the pool of chocolate before her and no one else who happened to be hovering just beyond her eyeline. She wasn’t going to mess this up just to keep hiding. 

Not that she was actually hiding. 

For one, if she really wanted to hide, the kitchen wasn’t where she would go. Everyone—from Mary and Charles to the boys to every member of Charles’ family in a five-mile radius, who were alarmingly comfortable bursting into the house unannounced at all hours—knew where to look for Anne. Whether she was frosting cupcakes for C.J. and Wally to take to school or kneading bread for dinner, dependable Anne could always be found in the kitchen.

In fact, Lou and Hettie had whirled in nearly an hour ago and immediately popped their heads in to say hi, as if they had no doubt that they’d find Anne just where she stood at the kitchen island. Anne barely had a chance to reply before they were dashing upstairs to take advantage of one of their sister-in-law’s rare magnanimous moods and rifle through Mary’s closet. 

If they’d come just a little later, if it hadn’t just been Anne and C.J. they found, maybe they would have stayed a bit longer. 

_Well_ , she considered, her spatula smoothing out the chocolate only for the bench scraper to gather it all back up again, _there was no “maybe” about it_. 

Which brought her to the other thing: if Anne were hiding, she’d be doing a pretty bad job of it. She wasn’t remotely alone, much as she might like to pretend otherwise.

Of course, poor C.J., sitting in the breakfast nook and disconsolately trying to color with his left hand wasn’t the problem. 

“How you doing, bud?” she asked, scooping up chocolate on her spatula and watching its fall back to the counter with a critical eye. Beyond the thin stream, her gaze snagged on the elephant in the room. 

Hard as she’d tried to ignore him—and, when that didn’t work, continually wished that she hadn’t been subjected to nearly twenty minutes of excruciating awkwardness—it wasn’t just her and her nephew passing a quiet morning in the kitchen. No, they were playing host to a silent, borderline surly, Frederick Wentworth, too. 

At the very least, he wasn’t the passionate, dynamic chef who’d steadily been taking the culinary world by storm or the charming, funny man he’d been for the Musgroves since entering their lives. He wasn’t even the coolly polite acquaintance he’d shown Anne since reentering hers. 

He was—and having spent enough time with her young nephews, to say nothing of their mother, Anne felt perfectly qualified in saying so—downright petulant. He wasn't so juvenile as to actively pout, but Anne recognized attitude when she saw it.

That his mood was inspired by her presence was uncontestable. Since practically flinching at the sight of just her and C.J. in the kitchen, he'd only looked her in the eye once and spoken to her hardly any more. He'd asked if she'd seen Hettie and Lou, and Anne thought her reply, that they were just upstairs and would probably be down soon, was admirably lacking in inflection. Whether or not Frederick agreed, she didn't know; he'd settled in to wait for the Musgrove girls and steadfastly pretend he was doing so alone. 

With her secret ex-boyfriend filling the room with his tense, dissatisfied silence, it wasn’t any wonder Anne didn't feel like she was in the right frame of mind to be tempering chocolate. 

And yet, here she was, scraping a pool of melted chocolate across her sister’s countertop, trying to achieve the perfect consistency. 

All because C.J. had asked. 

Anne liked to think that if he hadn’t looked so pitiful with his arm in its sling and his lower lip trembling so minutely she was sure he wasn’t doing it on purpose, she would have been able to tell him no. After all, the refrigerator already held the remnants of a triple chocolate cake she’d made just a few days ago, and the cookie jar was full of his favorite snickerdoodles. To say nothing of the plans she’d had to make cinnamon rolls for this Sunday’s brunch or the almond flour and powdered sugar she'd already picked up for macarons. Oh, and there was that red velvet recipe she'd been wanting to try—

(Then again, she could hardly remember the last time she’d given anyone a hard no. It was why she’d stopped taking calls from unknown numbers; she always felt bad turning down telemarketers.) 

But then he’d turned his big, solemn brown eyes up to her and asked, “With the bloody guts too?” and what was she supposed to do? Not make a batch of the white chocolate and strawberry sharks she’d used to decorate his birthday cake three months ago? Mary had been horrified then and would be horrified now, but Anne figured she’d just save her sister the trouble of looking for something to complain about. Anyway, what else did she have to do today? 

Aside from pretending she wasn’t hyper-aware that the only other adult in the room was doing his best to ignore her very existence.

C.J. just sighed heavily and traded his green marker for orange. 

“I know how you feel,” she muttered, her traitorous gaze flicking to Frederick once again. 

She looked away just as quickly. Perhaps she’d become accustomed to the heavy well of guilt and shame that roiled whenever she thought of him in the past eight years, but it was nothing to what rose in her chest every time she’d had to look at him, so much better and worse in person than catching a glimpse of his picture in a magazine or on TV, in the past three weeks. 

At the very least, it seemed as if he was never looking back. 

It was cold comfort, and the usually meditative swirl of her offset spatula through warm chocolate did nothing to soothe Anne’s nerves. Though maybe that had something to do with her choppy, harsh strokes. Consciously, she had to remind herself to keep her wrist loose and movements fluid. Half of her was convinced that if she wasn’t careful, didn’t rein in her emotions, she’d ruin a pound of good, expensive chocolate.

It was something her mother had always said: food could sense its maker’s moods.

("A happy baker makes for happy bread," she'd said a million times, though Anne would give just about anything to hear it from her mother's lips just once more.) 

Personally, she usually didn’t see the truth in it; nothing she’d made in the past eight years would’ve come out right if it were. 

Whatever else Anne Elliot had lost, she’d always had her baking.

That wasn’t the consolation she’d once hoped it would be. Which, of course, didn’t stop her from hiding away in the kitchen, making overly-involved desserts to avoid the things that were bothering her. 

Or not hiding. Because, as she’d already justified to herself, she definitely wasn’t. 

The fact that her heart jumped straight into her throat out of sheer relief when she heard the front door open and footsteps approach made that denial hard to truly believe. The fact that Charlie Hayter appeared in the doorway, eyes skimming over Anne as he hopefully sought out Hettie, meant she didn’t have to examine that reaction too closely. 

Upon realizing it was just C.J. and Anne and Frederick, who had also looked up eagerly from his determined perusal of Mary’s little-used collection of cookbooks, in the kitchen, Charlie gave a delayed, sheepish greeting to Anne. 

“Oh, uh,” he said, trying hard not to look too disappointed, “hey, Anne.” He pointedly ignored Frederick. 

“Hey, Charlie.” When he hovered on the threshold uncertainly, she took pity on him. “Lou and Hettie are upstairs. They should be down soon.”

His shoulders slumped in relief, and Anne just tried not to laugh, her mood lifting. Whatever problems she had, at least she didn’t have to deal with the agonies of young love. 

Well, not anymore. 

Anne shook off the melancholy thought—she’d had so much practice lately, it wasn’t even hard—and scraped the cooled chocolate back into the bowl with the rest, stirring it all into a perfectly tempered, glossy swirl. Not even her heartache could counteract thermodynamics. 

Meanwhile, Charlie perched on a stool on the other side of the island and pulled out his phone, apparently content to wait for his almost-girlfriend in silence. 

Which was really fine by Anne. She didn’t love having an audience when she baked, and Charlie’s disinterest was a soothing barrier between her and Frederick’s pointed antipathy. It was enough of a return to the usual state of affairs whenever she visited Mary and her in-laws that Anne finished prepping the chocolate molds with minimum fuss. Soon, they were coated in a base layer of chocolate and ready to be filled.

She turned from the mess she’d made to grab the filling cooling in its pot by the sink. Dipping a pinky into the bright red syrup, she took a taste. A sweet shock of strawberry, cheerful and tart, burst across her tongue, underpinned and deepened by the lemon juice and honey she’d added. Her lips curved in an automatic, pleased smile. 

That smile froze and then melted away when she turned back to the half-finished candies and found she wasn’t as unobserved as she had thought. 

Much closer than he’d been when she last looked, and surveying the scene with a look of cool detachment, was Frederick Wentworth. The reason she was—wasn’t!—hiding in the kitchen. 

She faltered, but it was only when Frederick’s brow furrowed that she realized. Flustered, she went back to her chocolates, training her eyes on her work. Anne had given up on stealing glances within the first week Frederick had reentered her life. It had only taken a few to realize he looked the same—or better, more confident and self-possessed than he’d been at 23—as when she’d seen him last. And again, it wasn’t as if he ever bothered to look back. 

Ignoring the instinct that maybe that wasn’t true at the moment, Anne spooned the strawberry filling into the molds. However carefully she worked, though, like some law of baking or existence itself would be thwarted if it were otherwise, her fingers were soon coated in sticky, red syrup. 

Which, of course, was precisely when Wally barreled into the kitchen and straight into Anne. 

Giggling, clearly relishing in his momentary, nanny-free existence, her nephew did his best to spider-monkey his way up her legs and into her arms. 

"Annie Annie!" he shrieked, utterly unconcerned that his aunt was busy at the moment and might not want to be treated like a jungle gym. 

“Wally, buddy,” Anne tried pleadingly, at a loss of what to do. She wasn’t about to smear her nephew, or his pristine Brooks Brothers Kids sweater, with strawberry candy filling to free herself. Anne had heard enough of Mary's hysterics last week about grass stains on Burberry polos to invite that kind of reaction again. Just like she wasn’t about to hop over to the sink, Wally’s disconcertingly strong hold around her shins keeping her from anything else, so she could wash her hands. With her luck, she’d trip, squash the little guy, and end up with two nephews nursing broken bones. “I need you to let go.”

He shouted his favorite word—”No!”—with far too much enthusiasm, little hands already digging into Anne’s thighs as he continued his climb. Thankfully, he never got too high before losing the battle with gravity, but he was tenacious, never giving up his grip long enough for Anne to shake him loose. If he wasn’t careful, which he wasn’t, he was going to end up pantsing her before he actually managed to make it anywhere. 

Which was just what Anne needed today. 

“Wally,” she said, this time aiming for stern, even as she turned to follow Wally as he scuttled around to cling to her from the back. Like a dog chasing its tail, she couldn't catch up with him. “Get down. You have five seconds.”

Looking down at him, her hands still held ineffectually before her, it seemed like he noted her tactical shift. His little chin took on a stubborn set, and he drew in a deep breath. 

Anne hardly had time to brace herself before Wally started to scream. 

The sudden burst of sound ruptured the tranquil, if tense—or maybe that was just Anne’s perception—air in the kitchen. 

C.J. started shouting, demanding his little brother “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Charlie startled, his phone dropping to the counter with a clatter. He was more reasonable in his demands, though he nearly had to yell to be heard over the littlest Musgroves’ racket. 

“C’mon, dude. Let go of your aunt, and we can play a game.”

Wally, needless to say, did not listen. If anything, he clung even harder to Anne, his screams quickly turning to actual tears. Anne had been old enough when Mary was the same age to recognize the habits of the mother reborn in her son. Ordinarily, she might think this was just the dose of karma her sister deserved, but really nothing about this was ordinary. 

A fact that was underlined by the resolution to Anne’s conundrum. 

No, Wally did not suddenly and magically decide to cooperate, release his aunt’s legs, and start behaving like a perfect angel, though Anne wasn’t sure that would have shocked her more than what really happened. 

Before she registered that he’d actually moved, Frederick was at her side. With a friendly, “Up we go,” he’d loosened Wally’s grip and deftly bounced him into the air. Airborne, the toddler’s wails were cut off by a delighted squeal and demand for more. Luckily, Frederick was willing to oblige. 

Anne didn’t let herself stay and watch her ex-boyfriend play with her nephew; the glimpse she got—Frederick’s familiar grin and a child who looked even somewhat like her in his arms—was more than enough. Rather, she turned to the sink and quickly rinsed off her hands. If it put her back to the rest of the kitchen and gave her a moment to collect herself, that was just coincidence and not a well-calculated advantage. 

Once she was sure she could face everyone with something approaching indifference, Anne stepped back from the sink. 

Of course, because this was just the way her day was going, that was precisely when C.J. decided he was done struggling to color, he wanted his iPad. He tore out of the kitchen in pursuit of it. Wally, seeing his big brother on the move, wriggled out of Frederick’s arms to race after. 

If he were less single-minded in his pursuit, maybe he would have veered out of Anne’s way. Then again, it wasn’t as if nearly-three-year-olds were all that good at keeping an eye out for danger.

As it was, Anne had to stumble back or risk crushing her nephew for the second time in five minutes. 

Even if Wally was safe from a flattening, Anne wasn’t. Her heel skidded out from under her, and she could feel herself starting to fall. 

She braced for an impact that never came. 

Instead, a strong, too familiar, arm wrapped around her waist and yanked her back upright. Upright and straight into a well-muscled chest. 

All the peace her moment at the sink had earned her fled. 

Anne was distantly aware of her heart starting to pound, her cheeks no doubt flushing an awful, telltale pink. 

What she was more aware of was the fact that for the first time in eight years, she was back in Frederick Wentworth’s arms and wished that she’d never left them. 

It was the kind of wish that she always had, but one that was usually content to simmer along on a backburner in her mind. Usually, she was too busy—running the bakery or dancing attendance on her father and Elizabeth even as she tried to curb their worst excesses or coaxing Mary out of an imagined ailment—to give the wish much of her attention, but it was always there, just waiting to boil over at her slightest moment of weakness. 

Just as it did now. 

Anne stared straight ahead, her fondest wish and greatest regret looming large and unavoidable.

She fixed her sight on Frederick’s open collar and the notch of his throat it revealed. The bare sliver of tantalizing skin was enough to make her feel lightheaded, maybe necessitate the arm he still had braced around her waist, but she didn’t tear her eyes away. Not just because she could watch the way his Adam’s apple sank and rose on a swallow or trace the line his razor must have made this morning. But because if she lifted her eyes any higher, looked into Frederick’s dear, familiar face, she would know. She would know if it was distaste or indifference—anything else was too much to ask—he felt. 

If she looked up, caught a glimpse of the truth sure to be in his eyes, she would be lost. That wish would die, and she wasn’t sure how to survive without it.

Gingerly, and utterly unsurprised that it hurt nearly as much now as it ever had, Anne extracted herself from Frederick’s grasp. 

“The chocolate’s going to set,” she murmured, gesturing vaguely to the counter and still refusing to look him in the eye. 

He released her immediately, though the warmth his hands left didn’t fade. “Right,” Frederick said, nodding sharply and retreating like she might burn him. 

Anne couldn’t blame him, but that didn’t muffle her pang of regret. 

With a heavy, inward sigh, she turned back to the mess on the counter—the drying chocolate on the counter she’d missed and the splatters of strawberry jam—and tried hard not to see it as some kind of heavy-handed metaphor. A little soap and water, as well as a good scrubbing, would wipe away all traces of her culinary endeavors; there was nothing so simple that could fix all that lay between her and Frederick. 

At least when it came to the chocolate, she’d have a bit of sweetness to look forward to. That, she figured, was the best she could hope for.


End file.
